First Contacts:
The Essential Murray Leinster

by Murray Leinster

First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster contains 24 stories
covering the full spectrum of Leinster's career. Included are such classic early
works as "Proxima Centauri," "First Contact," and one of the
earliest alternate timeline stories, "Sidewise in Time." Included are
"Keyhole," "De Profundis," and a story written in 1945 that
anticipated the Internet, "A Logic Named Joe." The Hugo Award-winning
"Exploration Team" was the inspiration for our full-color cover art by
Hannibal King. Also, here for the first time are "The Great
Catastrophe," his lost pulp epic, and the inspiring "To All Fat
Policemen." There is a four-page introduction by renowned author Hal
Clement.

Table of Contents

Will by Hal Clement

Editor's Introduction by Joe Rico

A Logic Named Joe

If You Was a Globulin

The Ethical Equations

Keyhole

Doomsday Deferred

First Contact

Nobody Saw the Ship

Pipeline to Pluto

The Lonely Planet

De Profundis

The Power

The Castaway

The Strange Case of John Kingman

Proxima Centauri

The Fourth-Dimensional Demonstrator

Sam, This Is You

Sidewise in Time

Scrimshaw

Symbiosis

Cure for a Ylith

Plague on Kryder II

Exploration Team

Introduction to the Unpublished Stories by Joe Rico

The Great Catastrophe

To All Fat Policemen

Murray Leinster

Born William Fitzgerald Jenkins in 1896, near Norfolk, Virginia, Murray
Leinster worked almost exclusively as a writer of science fiction and mystery
literature. He did take time out for the two World Wars and to invent the
back-projector special effect for motion pictures, perhaps the earliest virtual
reality device. As befits one of the few authors who wrote for both the early
pulps and modem science fiction magazines, Leinster won both a Hugo (for
"Exploration Team") and a RetroHugo for "First Contact".

Hannibal King, a martial arts expert who lives in Dorchester,
Massachusetts, has done extensive work in comics and collectible card games.
This is his first book cover.